Detournements, Allusions and Quotations in Guy
Debord'sThe Society of the Spectacle

Thesis 1

“All of life in the societies in which modern
conditions of production reign presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles.”

Détournement of Marx, Capital: “The wealth of societies in
which the mode of capitalist production prevails appears as ‘an immense
accumulation of commodities.’”

Thesis 2

“in which the liar has lied to himself”

Détournement of Hegel, The Science of Logic: “Truth verifies
itself.”

“the autonomous movement of the non-living”

Allusion to Hegel, The First Philosophy of Spirit:
“Money is the material, existing concept, the form of unity or
even the possibility of all the things needed. Need and work elevated to
this universality thus form for themselves in a great number of people
an immense system of community and reciprocal dependence, a life that
dies in itself autonomously from a dead reality”

Thesis 4

“The spectacle is not an ensemble of images, but
a social connection between people, mediated by images.”

Détournement of Marx, Capital: “Thus one discovers that
instead of being a thing, capital is a social connection established by
the intermediary of things.”

Thesis 6

“is at once the result and the project”

Allusion to A. Kojeve, Introduction to Reading Hegel: “As a
result that is a project and as a project that is a result
-- a result born from the project and a project engendered by a result;
in a word, the real is revealed in its dialectical truth as a
synthesis.

“It is not a supplement to the real world, its
added-on decoration.”

Allusion to Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: “Religion is the general theory of this world,
its encyclopedic compendium (...) its solemn complement.”

Thesis 7

“separation makes itself part of the unity of the
world”

Détournement of Hegel.

Thesis 8

“This doubling is itself doubled”; “Objective
reality is present on both sides. Each notion thus fixed has for a
foundation only its passage into its opposite”; “This reciprocal
alienation is the essence”

Détournements of Hegel.

Thesis 9

“In the world that is really inverted, the
true is a moment of the false.”

Détournement of Hegel, Thesis 39, Preface to The Phenomenology of
Spirit: “Yet we cannot therefore say that the false is a moment of
the true, let alone a component part of it”

Thesis 12

“What appears is good, what is good
appears.”

Détournement of Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right:
“What is real is rational, what is rational is real.”

Thesis 13

“It is the sun that never sets”

Détournement of formula applied to the Empire of Charles V: “The
Empire on which the sun never sets”

Thesis 14

“The goal is nothing, development is
everything.”

Détournement of E. Bernstein, Theoretical Socialism and
Social-Democratic Practice: “Movement is everything and the end is
nothing.”

Thesis 17

“degradation of being into
having”

Allusion to Marx, Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts: “In place of all the physical and intellectual
meanings there have thus appeared the meaning of having, which is to
imply the alienation of all meaning.”

Thesis 18

“There where the real world changes into mere
images, mere images become real beings.”

Détournement of Marx, The Holy Family: “For the man for whom
the external world changes into a mere idea, mere ideas become sensible
beings.”

Thesis 19

“The spectacle is the inheritor of all the
weaknesses of the Western philosophical project, which was a
comprehension of activity dominated by the categories of
seeing.”

Allusion to Johan Huizinga, The Decline of the Middle Ages:
“One of the fundamental traits of the declining Middle Ages was the
predominance of the sense of sight, a predominance that seems to be in
close connection with the atrophy of thought. One thinks and expresses
oneself through visual images.”

“It does not realize philosophy,
but philosophizes reality.”

Allusion to Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's
Philosophy of Right: “You cannot surmount philosophy without
realizing it.”

Thesis 20

“have not dissipated the religious clouds in
which human beings have placed their own powers, which have been
detached from them: it has only bound them to a terrestrial base. Thus
it is the most earthbound life that becomes opaque and unbreathable. It
no longer projects into heaven, but lodges in itself its absolute
withdrawal, its fallacious paradise. The spectacle is the technical
realization of the exile of human power in a beyond; the split achieved
in the interior of the human being.”

“The fact that the practical power of modern
society has detached itself from itself, and has built an independent
empire in the spectacle, can only be explained by the fact that this
powerful practice continues to lack cohesion and remains in
contradiction with itself.”

Détournement of Marx, Theses on Feuerbach: “For the fact that
the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself in the
clouds as an independent realm can only be explained by the inner strife
and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis.”

Thesis 23

“The most modern in [the spectacle] is also the
most archaic.”

Allusion to Marx, Introduction to The Critique of Political
Economy (the Introduction to the Grundrisse): “Such
determinations would be common to the most modern epoch and the most
ancient.”

Thesis 24

“The fetishistic appearance of pure objectivity
in spectacular relations hides their relational character between human
beings and between classes: a second nature appears to dominate our
environment through its fatal laws.”

Lukacs, History and Class
Consciousness.

Thesis 29

“In the spectacle, a part of the world
represents itself to the world and is superior to it.”

Détournement of Marx, Theses on Feuerbach: “H ence this
doctrine is bound to divide society into two parts, one of which is
superior to society.”

“The spectacle unites the separate, but it unites it as the
separate.”

Détournement of Hegel, Youthful Theological
Works: “In love, the separate still exists but no longer as
separate: as a unity, and the living encounters the living.”

Thesis 30

“The alienation of the spectator to the profit
of the contemplated object (which is the result of its own unconscious
activity) expresses itself thus: the more he contemplates, the less he
lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of
need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires. The
exteriority of the spectacle with respect to the actor appears in the
fact that his own gestures are no longer his, but those of another who
represents them to him. This is why the spectator does not feel at home
anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.”

Détournement of Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
“The renunciation of self, the renunciation of life and all desire is
the central thesis [of political economy] . . . . The less you are, the
less you manifest your life; the more you have, the more your alienated
life grows, the more you accumulate your alienated being.”

Thesis 31

“The spectacle is the map of this new world, a
map that exactly covers the territory.”

Allusion to Jorge Luis
Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"

Thesis 35

“In the essential movement of the spectacle,
which consists in retrieving for itself all that exists in the fluid
state in human activity, so as to possess it in a coagulated state,
insofar as things have become the exclusive value by their
formulation in the negative of lived value, we recognize our old
enemy that we know so well.”

Détournement of Marx, Toast to the Anniversary of the People's
Paper.

“appears at first glance something trivial and
understandable in itself, while it is, on the contrary, quite complex
and full of metaphysical subtleties: the commodity.”

Allusion to Marx, Capital: “A commodity appears at first sight
an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it
is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties.”

Thesis 38

“equality in itself, the category of the
quantitive”

Hegel, Encyclopedia.

Thesis 41

“like the familiar that isn't, for all that,
unknown,”

Allusion to Hegel, Preface to The Phenomenology of Spirit:
“What is well known in general, exactly because it is well known, is not
known.”

Thesis 47

“the tendency of use value to fall”

Détournement of Marx, Capital: “the tendency of the rate of
profit to fall”

Thesis 51

“this autonomous victory must at the same time
be its loss”

Allusion to Marx, Letter to Ruge, September
1843: “its victory is at the same time its loss.”

Thesis 52

“There where the economic Id was, must
come the Ego.”

Détournement of Freud, The Ego and the Id.

Thesis 53

“where the commodity contemplates itself in a
world it has created.”

Détournement of Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:
“He contemplates himself in a world that he himself has created.”

Thesis 63

“surrounded by desolation and terror, at the
tranquil center of misfortune.”

Quotation from Herman Melville,
Moby Dick.

Thesis 66

“does not sing of men and their arms”

Allusion to Virgil, Aeneid: “Of warfare and a man I sing.”

“It is in this struggle that each commodity, by following its
passion, in fact realizes in unconsciousness something more
elevated:”

Détournement of Hegel, Reason in History: “The tools and the
means of something are more elevated, more vast, which they know nothing
of, which they realize in an unconscious fashion.”

“the
becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of
the world.”

Détournement of Marx, Differences between Democritus and
Epicurus: “At the same time that the world becomes philosophy,
philosophy becomes the world.”

“the particularity of the
commodity exhausts itself by fighting”

Allusion to Hegel,
Reason in History: “It is the particular that exhausts itself in
combat and is destroyed in part.”

Thesis 71

“Nothing stops for it; this is the state that is
natural for it and yet the most contrary to its inclinations.”

Détournement of Détournement of Blaise Pascal, Thoughts.

Chapter IV

“The proletariat as subject and
representation.”

Détournement of Schopenhauer, The World as
Will and Representation.

Thesis 73

“The real movement that suppresses existing conditions”

Quotation from Marx, The German Ideology.

Thesis 74

“men see themselves constrained to envision
their relations in a disabused manner.”

Allusion to Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto: “Men are
finally forced to envision their conditions of existence and their
reciprocal relations with disabused eyes.”

Thesis 76

“Hegel no longer had to interpret the
world, but the transformation of the world.”

Allusion to Marx, Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have
only interpreted the world in diverse manners: it is now important to
transform it.”

“absolute heroes who did what they wanted and
wanted what they did.”

Allusion to Hegel, Encyclopedia: “The great men have wanted
what they did, and did what they wanted.”

“and close the session
of the only tribunal at which the sentence of the truth can be
rendered.”

Allusion to Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Right: “The
history of the world is the tribunal of the world.”

“This historical thought is still only the consciousness that always
arrives too late and that enunciates the justification post
festum”

Allusion to Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right.

“the glorification of what exists”

Quotation from Korsch.

Thesis 77

“this thought of history isn’t forgotten”

Allusion to Hegel, Lessons on the History of Philosophy:
“Often it seems that the spirit forgets itself, loses itself”

Thesis 80

“its historical injuries do not leave
scars.”

Détournement of Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit: “The
injuries of the Spirit heal without leaving scars.”

“salvage by transfer”

Quotation from Korsch.

“Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive power
is the revolutionary class itself”

“by a revolutionary transformation of all of society or by the shared
destruction of the classes in struggle”

Quotation from The Communist Manifesto.

Thesis 90

“in which the theory of praxis is confirmed by
becoming practical theory.”

Allusion to Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness.

“And already the highest theoretical truth of the International
Association of Workers was its own existence in practice”

Allusion to Marx, The Civil War in France: “The greatest
social measure of the Commune”.

Thesis 91

“and everywhere the result has greatly differed
from what was wanted.”

Détournement of Engels.

Thesis 92

“The anarchists realized an ideal.”

Détournement of Marx, The Civil War in France: “The working
class has not realized an ideal.”

Thesis 103

“democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants”

Quotation of slogan by Lenin.

Thesis 107

“bureaucratic atoms“

Allusion to Hegel.

“the sovereign of the world who in this fashion knows himself to be
the absolute person, in the awareness of which there doesn’t exist any
higher spirit”

Allusion to Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit: “The sovereign
of the world in this fashion knows himself to be the absolute person,
embracing at the same time in himself all the being-here and in the
awareness of which there does not exist any higher spirit”.

“The sovereign of the world possesses the effective awareness of what
he is – the universal power of effectiveness – in the destructive
violence that he exercises against the Self of his subjects [and]
contrasting with it”; “the power ravaging this terrain”

Quotations from Hegel.

Thesis 114

“the demand for the permanent domination of the
present over the past”

Allusion to Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto: “In bourgeois society, the past dominates the
present; in communist society, it is the present that dominates the
past.”

“because the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in a
particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the reparation of a
particular wrong, nor in a great number of these wrongs, but only in
the absolute wrong of being pushed into the margins of life.”

Allusion to Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of
Right: “A class that claims no particular right due to the fact that
it does not suffer from a particular wrong but absolute injustice.”

Thesis 117

“the proletarian movement is its own product
and this product is the producer himself. He himself is his own
goal.”

Détournement of Hegel, Reason in History: “They have drawn
from themselves the idea that they have made themselves; and it is their
own goal that they have accomplished.”

Thesis 119

“it does not represent the class.”

Allusion to Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of
Right: “a class that represents all the classes.”

Thesis 121

“arms are nothing other than the essence
of the combatants”

Détournement of Hegel.

Thesis 122

“it can no longer combat alienation with
alienated forms.”

Allusion to Hegel, Lessons on the Philosophy of History: “[The
Church] has maintained the combat against the barbarity of sensuality in
a barbaric and terroristic manner.”

Thesis 123

“men without qualities”

Allusion to
Robert Musil, The Man Without Quality.

Thesis 125

“Man, 'the negative being who uniquely
is to the extent that he suppresses Being,' is identical to
time.”

Allusion to Kostas Papaioannou, Hegel: “Man and
time are identical.”

Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit:
“The negative being uniquely is to the extent that he suppresses
Being.”

“History has always existed, but not always in its
historical form.”

Détournement of Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843: “Reason
has always existed, but not always in its rational form.”

Thesis 126

“the real nature of man”; “nature that is born in human history – in
the generating act of human society”

Quotations from Marx.

Thesis 128

“the negative inquietude of the human”

Allusion to Hegel, Encyclopedia: “[Man] is what he isn’t and
isn’t what he is”.

Thesis 138

“decline of the Middle Ages”

Allusion to title of book by J. Huizinga.

Thesis 143

“There was history, but now no longer”

Quotation of Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Thesis 159

“Bringing the workers to the status of 'free'
producers and consumers of commodified time was the preliminary
condition for the violent expropriation of their time.”

Détournement of Marx, Capital.

Thesis 163

“all that exists independently of individuals”

Quotation from Marx, The German Ideology.

Thesis 164

“The world already possess the dream of a time,
of which it must now possess the consciousness so as to really live
it.”

Détournement of Marx, Letter to Ruge, September 1843: “The
world has for a long time possessed the dream of a thing, of which it
now suffices to become aware so as to really possess it.”

Thesis 165

“the heavy artillery that brought down all the walls of China”

Quotation from The Communist Manifesto.

Thesis 177

“Even here, nothing ever happens; and
nothing ever happens to it.”

Asger Jorn, Speech to the
Penguins and Other Writings.

Thesis 181

“The struggle of tradition and innovation”

Allusion to Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New.

Thesis 188

“When art become independent, representing its
world with brilliant colors, a moment of life has grown old and it does
not let itself be rejuvenated with brilliant colors [...] The grandeur
of art only begins to appear with the fall of life.”

Détournement of Hegel, Preface to The Philosophy of Right:
“When philosophy paints gray on gray, a form of life grows old and does
not let itself be rejuvenated with gray on gray; it only lets itself be
known; the Owl of Minerva only takes flight at the fall of night.”

Détournement of Marx, Introduction, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy
of Right: “Philosophy could not realize itself without abolishing
the proletariat; [and] the proletariat could not abolish itself without
realizing philosophy.”

Thesis 195

“conflict is at the origin of all things of its
world.”

Détournement of Heraclitus, Fragment 53: “War is the father of
all things.”

Thesis 200

“This is because history itself haunts modern society as a
specter”

Allusion to The Communist Manifesto.

Thesis 202

“As in all historical social science, it is
always necessary to keep in view, for the comprehension of
'structuralist' categories, that the categories express forms of
existence and conditions of existence.”

Détournement of Marx, Introduction to Critique of Political
Economy (Introduction to the Grundrisse): “It must not be
forgotten that their subject – here modern bourgeois society – is always
what is given, in the mind as well as in reality, and that categories
therefore express the forms of being, the characteristics
existence.”

“Just as one does not appreciate the value of a man
according to the conception that he has of himself”

Allusion to Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political
Economy: “One does not judge an individual on the idea that he has
of himself.”

“Structure is the daughter of current power.”

Détournement of Jonathan Swift: “Praise is the daughter of current
power.”

“With the result that it is not structuralism that feels
it must prove the transhistorical validity of the society of the
spectacle; it is, on the contrary, the society of the spectacle that
imposes itself as a massive reality that feels it must prove the cold
dream of structuralism.”

Détournement of Marx, Introduction to the Critique of Political
Economy (Introduction to the Grundrisse): “This example of
labor shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite
their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all
epochs, are nevertheless, in the spercific character of this
abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and
possess their full validity only for and within these relations.”

“One cannot appreciate such epochs of transformation according to the
awareness that these epochs have of themselves; quite the contrary, one
must explain that awareness with the aid of the contradictions of
material life”

Quotation from Marx, Preface, Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy.

Thesis 203

“Because it is obvious that no idea can lead
beyond the existing spectacle, but only to the beyond of the ideas
existing in the spectacle. To effectively destroy the society of the
spectacle, it is necessary that men put into action a practical
force.”

Allusion to Marx, The Holy Family: “Ideas can
never lead beyond an old order of the world, they can only lead beyond
the ideas of an old order of the world (...) To realize ideas, it is
necessary that men put them into play as a practical force” [or]
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: “To abolish the idea of
private property, the idea of communism is completely sufficient. To
effectively abolish private property [itself], there must be effective
collective action”

“This theory does not expect miracles from the working class.”

Allusion to Marx, The Civil War in France: “The working class
does not expect miracles from the Commune.”

Thesis 205

“In its very style, the exposition of
dialectical theory is a scandal and an abomination according to the
rules of the dominant language, and for the tastes that they have
produced, because in the positive use of existing concepts it includes,
at the same time, the intelligence of their recovered fluidity
and their necessary destruction.”

Allusion to Marx, Postface/Afterword to the Second German Edition of
Capital: “In its rational aspect, [the dialectic] is a scandal
and an abomination for the ruling classes and their doctrinaire
ideologues, because in the positive conception of existing things, it
includes, at the same time, the intelligence of their fatal negation,
and their necessary destruction.”

Thesis 207

“Ideas improve. The meaning of the words participates in it.
Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It stays close to the
phrase of an author, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea,
replaces it with the right one”

Exact quotation of Lautréamont, Poesies.

Thesis 208

“Detournement has not founded its cause on
anything exterior to its own truth”

Détournement of Stirner, The Ego and Its Own: “I have founded
my cause on nothing.”

Thesis 215

“the expression of the separation and the distancing between men”

Quotation from Marx.

“new power of deception”; “with the mass of growing objects . . . the
new domain of strange beings to whom man is enslaved”

Quotations from Marx, Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts.

Thesis 217

“separation has built its world.”

Allusion to Proverbs, 9, 1: “Wisdom has built her house.”

Thesis 221

“To emancipate itself from the material bases
of the inverted truth, this is what the self-emancipation of our epoch
consists. This 'historical mission to instaurate truth in the world' . .
. .”

Allusion to Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of
Right: “It is thus the task of history, before the beyond
of the truth has disappeared, to establish the truth in the
here-and-now.”

“the class that is capable of being the
dissolution of all the classes”

Quotation from Marx, Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of
Right.

“Directly tied to universal history”

Quotation from Marx.

(Releve des citations ou detournements de “La Societe du
Spectacle,“ published by Editions Farandola, Paris, 2002;
supplemented by material in Guy Debord Oeuvres, Gallimard, 2006.
Translated from the French and corrected by NOT BORED! and Anthony Hayes, respectively,
on 20 February 2013. No attempt has been made to harmonize these
renderings of Debord's text with those of other translators.)